This is such a good trick for spreadsheet user. Juice Analytics have a great trick on plotting graphs within the cell, by using the function REPT() to repeat a single bar character (“|”). They called it a In-cell bar graph:
What are some practical uses of in-cell bar graphs? For starters, they offer a good way to profile a dataset that has hundreds or thousands of rows. Here’s a picture of in-cell bars compared to a standard excel bar graph for a dataset with about 500 rows. It can be a lot easier to scan the results when they’re in-cell.
Another usage is lightweight dashboards. The report below compares a number of metrics for players using both in-cell bar graphs as well as conditional formatting. The conditional formatting highlights the top 25% of each metric in green and the bottom 25% in red but that is a story for another day.
Very practical – I am going to use it on my spreadsheets at work!
Lightweight data exploration in Excel – [Juice Analytics via ideaxidea]
That’s great! Just used it myself.
I just used this in Google Spreadsheets, where it is especially useful since they don’t have real graphs available.
There is actually a new cell-graph feature in Excel 2007.
LLLLLLLLLLOVE it!!!
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